“Reading Taylor Swiftly”CFP for Post-45 Contemporaries

Co-editors:

Stephanie Burt, Donald and Catherine Loker Professor of English, Harvard University

Gabriel Hankins, Associate Professor of English, Clemson University

Reading Taylor swiftly: we have all done it. As singer, lyricist, performer, and as celebrity text, Taylor Swift invokes and invites immediacy of response: she’s singing to me, she’s singing for me, her desires are mine, she's just not my thing, her lyrics are basic or based. The responses are immediate and everywhere in the Eras Tour Era, as are reactions from the Departments of Tortured Poets. Less common, as Michael Dango has noted in a critical review of “the Era of Taylor Swift Studies,” are attempts to mediate our engagements with Taylor Swift through theory, material analysis, cultural studies, fandom studies, or the tradition of the lyric. Swift’s enormous fan base, her diverse publics and counterpublics, her contested celebrity image, the affective structures of her albums and concerts, her precisely designed intimacies, her struggle for artistic control over her own work, her feminism, her politics, her lyric personas and transformations, her collective and collaborative work, the art itself: all these are taken as mere cultural epiphenomena of “too late capitalism,” to use Anna Kornbluh’s concise periodization. The result is that a critical immediacy of response has come to mirror its cultural-industrial counterpart, and critics and fans alike have tended to read Taylor too swiftly.

This cluster calls for new mediations of Taylor Swift, her music, her lyrics, her cultural moment and her celebrity text, whether as an object of longing, loathing, identification, disidentification, adoration or abjection. 

We invite papers on, for example:

·      Lyrics, forms, and lyrical traditions

·      Taylor and the literary past

·      The Tortured Poets Department(s)

·      Teaching Taylor across traditions and disciplines, i.e. sociology, psychology, musicology, Sound Studies

·      Celebrity studies, cultural studies, “Taylor Swift” as star image, celebrity text, and brand

·      Queer/transfandoms, remix cultures and meanings, and the meaning of Swift style

·      Swift and Swifties outside the American frame

·      Affective and temporal structures of belonging, unbelonging, longing

·      Poptimism and anti-poptimism in a time of precarity and polycrisis

·      Swift as cultural text and counter-text, normcore and normporn

·      Swift and the future of music criticism

·      Swift and craft: songcraft, stagecraft, musicianship, fashion design

·      Swift and the archive: unreleased, rumors and rarities

·      Material Girls and materialist politics

·      Re-reading Pop Icons after the Madonna-ology moment

·      Swifty feminism(s) and anti-feminist backlash

·      The Eras Tour as music-industrial moment

·      Taylor Swift in the City and the Country: metropolitan listeners and their others

·      Racebending, baiting, and re-crafting in the Eras Tour Era

·      Swift and Whiteness

Submissions of short or longer essays of 2,000-6,000 words should be submitted by July 15 2024 to readingtaylorswiftly@gmail.com. Inquiries are welcome before submission.